A cross-disciplinary view of an important De Soto chronicle.

Among the early Spanish chroniclers who contributed to popular images of the New World was the Amerindian-Spanish (mestizo) historian and literary writer, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616).  He authored several works, of which La Florida del Inca (1605) stands out as the best because of its unique Amerindian and European perspectives on the De Soto expedition (1539-1543).  As the child of an Indian mother and a Spanish father, Garcilaso lived in both worlds--and saw value in each. Hailed throughout Europe for his excellent contemporary Renaissance writing style, his work was characterized as literary art. Garcilaso revealed the emotions, struggles, and conflicts experienced by those who participated in the historic and grandiose adventure in La Florida. Although criticized for some lapses in accuracy in his attempts to paint both the Spaniards and the Amerindians as noble participants in a world-changing event, his work remains the most accessible of all the chronicles.

In this volume, Jonathan Steigman explores El Inca’s rationale and motivations in writing his chronicle. He suggests that El Inca was trying to influence events by influencing discourse; that he sought to create a discourse of tolerance and agrarianism, rather than the dominant European discourse of intolerance, persecution, and lust for wealth. Although El Inca's purposes went well beyond detailing the facts of De Soto’s entrada, his skill as a writer and his dual understanding of the backgrounds of the participants enabled him to paint a more complete picture than most--putting a sympathetic human face on explorers and natives alike.

This major contribution to contact period studies points to the Lasley Vore site in modern Oklahoma as the most likely first meeting place of Plains Indians and Europeans more than 300 years ago.

In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de la Harpe, departed St. Malo in Brittany for the New World. La Harpe, a member of the French bourgeoisie, arrived at Dauphin Island on the Gulf coast to take up the entrepreneurial concession provided by the director of the French colony, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville. La Harpe's charge was to open a trading post on the Red River just above a Caddoan village not far from present-day Texarkana. Following the establishment of this post, La Harpe ventured farther north to extend his trade market into the region occupied by the Wichita Indians. Here he encountered a Tawakoni village with an estimated 6,000 inhabitants, a number that swelled to 7,000 during the ten-day visit.

Despite years of ethnohistoric and archaeological research, no scholar had successfully established where this important meeting took place. Then in 1988, George Odell and his crew surveyed and excavated an area 13 miles south of Tulsa, along the Arkansas River, that revealed undeniable association of Native American habitation refuse with 18th-century European trade goods.

Odell here presents a full account of the presumed location of the Tawakoni village as revealed through the analysis of excavated materials from nine specialist collaborators. In a strikingly well-written narrative report, employing careful study and innovative analysis supported by appendixes containing the excavation data, Odell combines documentary history and archaeological evidence to pinpoint the probable site of the first European contact with North American Plains Indians.

Marks the celebration by the modern city of Pensacola, Florida, of the 450th anniversary of Luna’s fateful colony

The 1559–1561 expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano to Florida was at the time of Spain’s most ambitious attempt yet to establish a colonial presence in southeastern North America. In June of 159, eleven ships carrying some five hundred soldiers and one thousand additional colonists, including not just Spaniards but also many of Aztec and African descent, sailed north from Veracruz, Mexico, on their way to the bay known then as Ochuse, and later as Pensacola. Finally arriving in mid-August, the colonists quickly sent word of their arrival back to Mexico and unloaded their supplies over the next five weeks, leaving vital food stores onboard the vessels until suitable warehouses could be constructed in the new settlement. When an unexpected hurricane struck on the night of September 19, 1559, however, seven of ten remaining vessels in Luna’s fleet were destroyed, and the expedition was instantaneously converted from a colonial venture to a mission in need of rescue.

The 1559–1561 expedition of Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano to Florida was at the time of Spain’s most ambitious attempt yet to establish a colonial presence in southeastern North America. In June of 159, eleven ships carrying some five hundred soldiers and one thousand additional colonists, including not just Spaniards but also many of Aztec and African descent, sailed north from Veracruz, Mexico, on their way to the bay known then as Ochuse, and later as Pensacola. Finally arriving in mid-August, the colonists quickly sent word of their arrival back to Mexico and unloaded their supplies over the next five weeks, leaving vital food stores onboard the vessels until suitable warehouses could be constructed in the new settlement. When an unexpected hurricane struck on the night of September 19, 1559, however, seven of ten remaining vessels in Luna’s fleet were destroyed, and the expedition was instantaneously converted from a colonial venture to a mission in need of rescue.

Though ultimately doomed to failure by the hurricane that devastated their fleet and food stores, the Luna expedition nonetheless served as an immediate prelude to the successful establishment of a permanent colonial presence at St. Augustine on Florida’s Atlantic coast in 1565, and prefaced the eventual establishment after 1698 of three successive Spanish presidios at the same Pensacola Bay where Luna’s attempt had been made more than a century before.